


Falling Sand

by lyrisey



Category: Noita (Video Game), Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Dreams vs. Reality, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Wands
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-23
Packaged: 2021-03-25 04:27:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30083439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyrisey/pseuds/lyrisey
Summary: Taylor isn't a parahuman. She's something far more terrifying.A tayle of magic beyond what the world can bear.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 49





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Content Warning: This is a Worm fanfic. Worm involves topics relating to mental health and trauma. If you're uncomfortable with these topics, I'd suggest you give this work a pass.

She's been crawling for so long.

Stone wraps heavy around her: she scrapes elbows and knees against unyielding stone, barks knuckles as she scrabbles forward in the impenetrable dark.

She keeps going forward, because the only thing behind her is the locker.

* * *

She feels it before anything else: the walls around her open up, their grip falls away, and she transitions, Grecian, morning then evening then noon: hands and knees to a hunched-over stoop to standing in the dark, arms extended as her fingertips brush the tunnel walls.

She has space, freedom of movement, but the only way for her is forward: she treads carefully, sneakers shuffling over soft earth.

It's still dark.

* * *

She thinks it's a figment, at first: a glimmering spark in the void, sensation invented by the necessity of deprivation.

She keeps going, because what else is there for her?

* * *

It's real.

It's _impossible_ : a rod of blue-green crystal, splitting and diverging like a sapling grown by an arborist with a procedural generation fetish, glowing with a soft light as it floats above a stone pedestal.

She shouldn't reach for it and she does, curls her fingers around warm stone and feels the weight as it rests heavy in her hand.

* * *

Impossibility multiplies.

It's a _wand_ ; she discovers this through experimentation, how a casual flick sparks an actinic bolt of light.

It leaves afterimages in her vision.

It leaves a small, scorched crater in the tunnel wall.

* * *

The way forward is down: she keeps going, descends, wand gripped in sweaty hand.

There's more light here, and it lets her see how things are changing: how natural rock transitions to cut stone, blocks and wooden timbers. How there's the discards of civilization: tables, chairs, a minecart.

* * *

She had been hoping for people.

She's not hoping anymore.

The things that live down here aren't people anymore, not the way she thinks of them: skin tainted a sickly green and eyes that glint bright in the dark.

They see her and they come running, feet clattering over loosely-piled coal, teeth bared, _screaming_ -

* * *

There's so much blood: she wades through puddles that come up to her ankles, smells metal and feels how it's clotting into slick slime on her clothes and skin.

Most of it isn't hers.

She has a measure of experience now, a blend of proficiency and caution: She's learned to be careful, engage at range, that some of these things have guns, explosives, that they're willing to burn the world to get at her.

Blood runs down her arm, drips off the branches of her wand.

She's getting tired.

* * *

She doesn't know how long it's been; she doesn't have a watch, she can't see the sun, and her head swims with blood loss and fatigue.

The only markers she has are the ones that stick in her memory: how the walls look in firelight, tunnels and rooms.

She finds another pedestal, another wand floating above it; her eyes trace the branching geometry, and she reaches for it, takes it in hand.

It's larger than her first one, long as a baseball bat and studded with chunks of crystal like Neptune's trident.

She aims it at the wall, tries to activate it, isn't prepared for the sawblade that sprouts from the end of the wand, caroms off the stone walls and bounces back towards her-

* * *

She wakes in her hospital bed with a gasp, a needle in one arm and her father's hand in hers, machines softly beeping around them.


	2. Chapter 2

The nights are all the same, and the days are all the same.

Every time she sleeps, she goes back to the cave, the wand.

Every time she sleeps, she _descends_.

She tries to retrace her steps and can't; she wakes and the path is eaten, the tunnel and the cave and the mines reform, the dream recurring and different each time.

She's a little cautious, a little more reckless; her approach is defined by the one constant she's found, that her death here isn't _real_ : no matter her end, she wakes in her bed the next morning.

* * *

She learns what to expect from the mines, starts to figure out strategies and tactics as she explores.

She learns to use cover, to keep moving when she can't find any.

She learns the monsters: the three-eyes, the monster-men from before, the slimeballs and the rats and firemen; she learns how they burn, that the crates and barrels around her are _excessively_ volatile under the right circumstances.

She wakes up.

* * *

She learns she can fly when she missteps and falls down a shaft, pulls at something inside herself and feels it _respond_ as she slows, wobbles to a stop in midair, starts to rise again.

She learns that the core of that power is finite, limited; she falls.

She wakes up.

* * *

She remembers to be careful with the new wands she finds, to test at more appropriate ranges.

She blows a hole in a wall, drenches herself in burning green slime.

She wakes up.

* * *

She learns to keep track of her surroundings, to remember where pools of water are so she can rinse herself off or douse a fire.

She learns blood is just as good as water; and in some ways, even better.

* * *

She dreams and descends and she dies.

She wakes up in her bed like any normal girl, smells breakfast downstairs and feels the ache in her gut as she thinks about another day gone in her recovery.

Soon she's going to be well enough to go back to school.

She sits on the edge of her bed and remembers her dreams, the wand in her hand that's never there when she wakes.

And every time she goes downstairs, she skips the last step, jumps and reaches for that core of power that slowed her fall.

She lands, every time.


	3. Chapter 3

The morning she goes back to school, she jumps from the staircase, and it takes a little longer for her feet to hit the floor.

She spends the rest of the day doubting herself, her memory, that she's letting her thoughts get the better of her.

 _What if_ , she thinks. _If, if, if_...

The word burns like a candle flame inside her, a secret that warms her through the rest of the day in a place where nothing she does matters.

* * *

Her feet beat upon the sidewalk as she makes her way home, arrives hours before her father returns from work.

She starts to go up the stairs to her room.

She stops, turns around, stares at the well-worn wooden floor at the foot of the stairs.

She remembers her dream and _jumps_ , grabs at that core of power with two mental hands and _squeezes_ , desperate-

And for a moment, then two, then three, she's suspended in the air.

And then it fails, that core of power slides out of her grasp, and she slams to the living room floor, ankles protesting.

But she's smiling, joyful despite that.

Because now?

Now she knows it's _real_.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: This chapter includes a reference to suicide - it's not depicted, but it is implied, so engage with discretion.

She starts keeping a journal - another one, a _new_ one, starts to fill it with notes about her dreams and log her waking progress.

The flight doesn't work like in her dreams, not yet: she only gets a few seconds before she crashes to the floor, but she's seen how it's just a matter of practice and focus, of training and getting stronger until one day she can use it for more than just jumping from a staircase.

She writes in her journal, wishes the pencil was a wand; she starts to sketch, draws the branching structures she remembers from her dreams.

She starts to catalogue, to systematize: the larger staves and staffs tend to do more, have more varied effects; the ones with branching ends shoot multiple projectiles at once; the crystals work as foci, provide stability and orderly progression.

She identifies the effects, develops her own crude terminology for describing orbs and bolts, hazes and shields, summons both animate and inanimate; she fills pages with notes on acid, electricity, fire, how they affect the substance of the world she finds herself embedded in each night.

She _studies_ : reading herself to sleep each night, staring at her pen-scrawl as her eyelids grow heavy and her vision blurs and she wakes up in darkness, surrounded by stone. She studies and forces herself to remember what she's learned, because she's the only common element in both of her worlds.

She gets better, goes deeper, uses her knowledge of the world and the wands and the monsters to protect herself; she sits with the wands she finds, tracing them with her fingertips until she's sure she can remember them the next morning.

She traverses the mine, wades through blood and slime and oil and finds the bottom, looks dubiously at the glowing nimbus of light.

Where else is she going to go?

* * *

The light blossoms, fades around her, and she finds herself in an alcove: not the raw rock and wooden supports of the mines, but worked stone, a passageway of smooth tan bricks leading to a pool of clear water.

She starts to scoop water up, splash herself clean; hesitates, then jumps into the pool, whooping as the cool liquid splashes up around her.

She floats, staring up at the ceiling, tan bricks vaulting overhead in a keystoned curve.

She feels at peace here, like this is a place where she can rest.

So she does.

* * *

Water drips on brown stone, shoes squish and spurt as she walks.

She's left the pool behind her; found that she's left other things, as well: she feels revitalized, the wounds from her descent gone as renewed vigor surges through her.

She continues down the passageway, and what she finds changes everything.

* * *

The room swells around her, brown stone given a golden sheen in the flickering firelight from the lanterns swinging on chains; there are bookshelves, vases, crates, a wall covered in dark-enameled panels that glint like dark water.

What catches her eye, though, are the wands: not just one or two but _five_ , a surfeit of riches floating in the center of the room.

She approaches: carefully at first, remembering prior experience and wands used as bait - but that feeling of safety pushes her to action, and she reaches out, plucks the smallest one out of the air; the others remain.

She turns the wand over in her hands, noting the shape and the structure, correlating it with remembered detail from her journal and studies.

She aims it back down the hallway, squints, fires: a small green projectile shoots down the hall, ricochets into the dark with a contrail of light following; she smiles, a half-twist of her lip because her guess wasn't _entirely_ wrong.

She starts to turn back, and freezes, staring at the wall, the one covered in those glossy, dark squares.

One of them has lit up: depicts a green dot, with green parentheses on either side.

* * *

It's a paradigm shift, an upheaval.

The panels on the wall light up when she activates the wand, change to show what the wand is doing when she fires.

There's more glyphs than there should be: panels light up that don't seem to relate to the projectiles themselves, but _how they're used_ : modifiers that make the spells she fires move in different ways, ones that leave trails behind the projectiles she shoots, that turn one shot into two or three or four, or split and flower them like the floral arcs of a firework.

She stares at the panels on the wall, fingers tightening around her wand-

-and she hears a _crunch_ , looks down to find that the branchlike structures been crushed in her grip.

* * *

It's not broken, not like she thought it was at first; something about this place makes the wands into things she can _modify_ , turns that arcane branching structure into nodes and links that she can pull apart and rejoin like a children's toy.

It affords further experimentation: She takes the wand, tears it apart into the smallest elements she can, and starts to connect them, piece by piece; how the process lets her iterate, learn what each piece does as they come together.

There's just so _much_ for her to learn here: she struggles to pack everything into memory, remembers being small and carrying an armful of apples in an orchard, fruit spilling as she walks.

There's so much for her to forget, and she doesn't want to lose any of it before she wakes.

So she prepares: tries to pack everything in her head, gives it all one last review as she clicks pieces together, metal and crystal, wood and bone.

She builds a wand, aims it down the hall; fires a bright spark into the darkness, hears the _thud_ of detonation, and she smiles, because it's what she'd meant to build.

She looks down at the wand, and flips it back, points it at herself.

* * *

She wakes up in her bed: sunlight in her window, her glasses askew, journal open in her lap.

She grabs a pencil, and she starts to write.


	5. Chapter 5

She sleeps and she dies and she wakes and she writes, and every night she learns a little more, fills her catalogue until she needs another notebook, fills that until the words spill off of the pages; she has a taxonomy of magic spread across her bedroom wall on sticky notes and index cards.

She's staring at it when it finally _clicks_ : the knowledge all comes together, the pattern becomes clear.

She knows how to build one.

It takes her a week to find what she needs: doweling, piping, brass and wire and shining stones.

She intersperses school and shopping with sleep: she travels through the mines again and again to reach the sanctum at the bottom, dogged determination in every movement as she descends, discovers.

* * *

"They're awful pretty," she fibs to the man in all-natural cotton behind the counter, "and I'm learning so much about their healing energies."

She leaves with a paper bag of amethyst, quartz clicking in her pockets like skeletal fingers.

One way or another, she gets what she needs.

* * *

It starts to come together.

She finishes the first two components, pushes them towards each other and hears them _click_ as they join together, the same sound as in her dream; she doesn't think she's going to forget that sound for the rest of her life, smiling to herself as she reinforces the connection with wire and epoxy.

* * *

It doesn't look _quite_ right when she's done: bulbous knots of wire, thick globs of glue, but it looks good enough for a first try, in a world where she can't depend on magic to join things together.

And when she puts her hand on it, feels how it _thrums_ with hidden power, shivering in her hand like an animal begging to be let off the leash?

She knows she's done it.

For just a moment, she's tempted to take the wand in hand, try it out, right then and there... and remembers the devastation she's caused in her nightly experiments.

She'll go to the Graveyard. Nobody will care there.  
(Nobody cares about what she does anyways)

* * *

She smells salt and rust through the bandanna covering her nose and mouth, feels the wind in her hair.

The wand sits in her hand, flashes and shines so prettily in the sun; she feels the power, a vibration in her hand that resonates up her arm, touches something deep in her core.

She lifts the wand, aims. Fires, feels the recoil rock her, a rush of force up her arm that forces her to take a step backwards.

It's not a bolt, but a _blast_ , an eruption of light that burrows into the ship's hull, into and _through_ , leaving a molten-edged void behind.

She shouts, excited, jubilant; can't help the bounce in her walk as she goes over, looks through the hole, feels the heat from the cherry-red edges and realizes she can see daylight on the other side.

She frolics, dancing through tombstoned hulls; presses her back against rusted steel, holds up her wand like she's posing for a spy movie poster, sidesteps and turns, bracing herself against the recoil as she snaps off another blast.

It's a joyful dance of destruction: she has _power_ , now, and nobody can take that away from her. She's going to be a hero, and it's going to make Emma and Sophia and that other girl totally back off-

She spins around another corner, extending her wand as she readies another blast against a defenseless boat, and realizes someone's standing in her way.

A man. Taller than her, clad in blue and silver, a staff clutched in one hand and tipped with a sharp blade and point - a halberd.

Armsmaster.

She gawps, frozen with surprise, because _Armsmaster_ and _there's a hero here_ and _the hero is Armsmaster_ and _oh my god I almost shot Armsmaster_ \- she realizes she still has her wand out, is still aiming at him, and she hurriedly lowers her aim.

His helm inclines as he looks down at her.

"Are you in distress?" His voice is dry, careful, smooth just like she remembers from the cartoons, and she shakes her head.

"We received a call reporting screams from near this location."

Oh. _Oh_.

"Was that you?"

Heat prickles up the back of her neck, warms her ears as she nods.

"Are you hurt, or in danger?" Light glints off his visor, and she gets the feeling he's looking her over.

She shakes her head, finally finds her voice. "I... uh. Just built a wand. And I was testing it out. That's all." She twists her hand, makes brass and crystal gleam in the sunlight again.

"Are you a parahuman?" His words are blunt and sharp, a tension to them.

She isn't sure how to respond; she knows she's not, that her dreams make her more than just a parahuman... but if she says so... she won't get to be a hero, will she?

She looks down at her wand, gnaws at her lip, realizing that Armsmaster is _still there_ and expecting an answer she's not ready to give.

She hears him exhale, looks up and finds him looking down at her.

"This is the wand you made?"

She tries to smile even though her gut curdles with anxiety and the realization that he can't see her expression, nods and holds it up for him to see, painfully aware of how crude it must look compared to the things he must see every day. "It's my first one," she says.

He looks at it, looks back at her. "What does it do?" he asks, and she can hear how his voice has softened from that forceful sharpness of a moment before.

"It shoots stuff, here-" She can't help smiling as she aims the wand at a nearby ship, fires another blast of light that eats a molten circle through thick steel. "See? _Thoom_."

For a long moment, Armsmaster doesn't move, his fingers clenched around the pole of his halberd as he watches hot steel drip and puddle on the sand.

And then there's another glint off his visor: the grainy shine of a laser, sweeping across the hole and marking out a scanning grid for a few seconds before flicking off.

She waits, fidgeting as he stands there, processing results... and then he looks back at her.

"This is... very impressive," he says, finally. "Are you planning on being a hero?"

His words are blunt and simple, and the validation hits her like a textbook straight in her gut, a jarring impact that shakes her to her core because _Armsmaster thinks she can be a hero_.

He's holding out a hand, she realizes, an unpracticed, honest smile under his visor. "Why don't you come back with me to the PRT? We can help you test your power, get things started on the right foot."

She swallows, stares at his gauntlet, the articulation in the open palm. "You'd take me? Even if..."

"Myrddin's a wizard, you know." He looks down at her. "We need all the heroes we can get."

She gnaws at her lip again, considers how he's been nothing but accepting, how he hasn't even _shouted_ at her for blowing a hole in a boat or said she's in trouble.

She reaches out, her hand finds his.

As they walk back to his transport, she decides she can't _wait_ to tell him all about her dreams.


End file.
